


Diastole

by lbmisscharlie



Series: Deoxygenated [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Familial Obligation, M/M, Overly Protective Brothers, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Timers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-17 23:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/873242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diastole: <i>noun</i><br/>     1.  the normal rhythmical dilatation of the heart during which the chambers are filling with blood. Compare <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/846239">systole</a></p>
<p>
  <i>The tremor that floats through him thrills, and he tamps it down, sternly. In his business, caring is not an advantage; fondness – love – only leads to weakness.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diastole

Children don’t often bear zeros on their wrists. The rare fated childhood friends; the broken zeros of tragedy striking too soon; the spare few who zero for a love beyond partnership.

Mycroft is born with six years, seven months, twenty-one days, eleven hours, and fifty-two minutes forming in his veins, and they tick down the moment his brother slips into this world.

Fifteen hours of labour and he appears, red-faced and screaming and as dissatisfied with the world as he will ever be. Mycroft’s legs stick to the vinyl chair distastefully; he can hear his mother’s grunts and groans, pained and primal, through the door, and they quieten only to be replaced by a screeching squall that sounds in time to the extra beating of Mycroft’s heart. Mycroft is called in, and his father lifts him to the edge of the bed, where he burrows next to his mother – smelling sour and weary – and pets and pets at Sherlock’s wet, dark hair, and knows he will never do him harm.

++

Of course, _do no harm_ and _keep from harm_ are two very different prospects. When Mycroft is eleven, his mother takes him to a specialist, not for his wrist but for his heart, which aches and leaves him short of breath unexpectedly. The electrocardiogram is normal until – until it stutters, beats twice rapidly then returns to normal, followed just seconds by a bang and a clatter from the other room. When they open the door, Sherlock looks over his shoulder at them from his clinging post on the upper cupboard door, hands scrambling to keep from falling off; at his feet lays the shattered remains of an EEG machine. 

Mother stands, stunned, in the doorway, so it’s Mycroft that pushes past, climbs a chair, and lifts Sherlock down. He refrains from saying anything snide, but removes the remaining electrodes from his chest and replaces his shirt, buttoning it carefully, and holds Sherlock’s hand as they leave. He never removes his wristband in his Mother’s sight again, and her gaze skims over him from that day forward, guiltily.

++

There are many times he wishes for a reset; many times he wonders what it might be like to have a partner – a soulmate – to have someone who doesn’t push him away at every opportunity. To have someone who doesn’t cause his heart to ache so. Someone who knows: for Sherlock, with all that he sees, is remarkably blind sometimes. 

Sherlock’s tumultuous childhood, with its writhing, snapping frustration, cannot compare to Sherlock at eighteen, twenty, twenty-three, when his anger rolls in on himself and works itself out through every tiny fissure in his maladjusted facade to pour, scalding, on whoever happens to be nearest. It was Mycroft, before, but it never is now.

++

The pain comes back, violently, with a sudden tearing edge, cutting off his breath; he’s sitting in a meeting with a future Prime Minister and it’s been six years since he’s felt it – six years, one month, three days, eight hours, and twenty-something minutes – but it’s familiar as ever. He stands, abruptly, and makes some weak excuse that leaves the faces before him gaping, and has a car take him to Sherlock’s flat.

He’d thought, in the nineteen minutes it takes to drive over, that it would be the cocaine. When he arrives to a violent slash of red spreading over the lino, its dragging trail leading to his brother’s body, collapsed against the kitchen cupboards, the sob in his throat is nearly relief. Blood he can handle; blood is what they are.

Sherlock is stitched up, given a transfusion of Mycroft’s own; he wonders if his blood will trouble Sherlock so, or if he is fated to that alone. At any rate, he doesn’t tell him, and he leaves the hospital before Sherlock wakes.

He’d throw him into rehab, if Sherlock wouldn’t leave right away. Instead, Mycroft pays his rent, and buys his clothes, and stocks his cupboards; Sherlock takes, and takes, and takes, drawing, all unknowing, on Mycroft’s blood. He’s so – so damnably clever, and Mycroft does all he can to entice him to civil service. Not for the good of the kingdom, no, but for some small semblance of control.

But then Sherlock meets Detective Inspector Lestrade, and a dead body, and is lost.

++

The Detective Inspector doesn’t often take lunch, and, Mycroft thinks fleetingly, he perhaps should, if only for the benefit of the vitamin D. He’s rather grey – grey suit grey hair grey face – and the distraction with which he picks at his sandwich disturbs. Mycroft wants to press his hands over the other man’s, still them, tell him to for god’s sake get rid of that awful thing parading as food, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he tries to bribe him.

It’s worked in the past; there are few who, having met him, are so fond of Sherlock that they’d rather spend time with him than alone with a bank account just that much sweeter. Greg Lestrade, however, only blinks at him and says, slowly, “You know I’m a detective, right?” as though that particular fact had not crossed Mycroft’s mind. Mycroft offers again and Lestrade sets his jaw and refuses, again, and it’s not just that he’s a good man – a decent man – but stubborn, too, and shrewd enough to want to uncover reasons layered deep enough to be invisible. 

He has a bit of colour to his cheeks now; effrontery suits him. “My brother can be quite intractable,” Mycroft says as he walks away, and can hear the moment that realization hits. 

“Your brother,” Lestrade says, and gapes for only a moment – less than expected, and takes Mycroft’s hand when offered, and holds it for a moment too long, looking at Mycroft, considering. His mouth works as he thinks, and he’s ready to ask more, so Mycroft says something inconsequential and biting about his wife and his reset and walks away.

++

Privacy, of course, is paramount in his position. A watch, carefully buckled – Italian leather, Swiss workings, gold and very sleek – and no one asks. Few would ever guess the truth, anyway, his numerological type being very rare. Most would assume a spouse at home, or perhaps the gentle mourning of a widower, or, if they’re feeling romantic and tragic, a soulmate lost before their time. Siblings, though: the tight, blood-woven coil of obligation and refuge and defence. Wristtimed siblings are uncommon; Mycroft has spent a lifetime hiding it, appearing ordinary, unassuming – particular, perhaps, but inoffensive – so much so that he forgets to look at the numbers himself, sometimes.

So when he catches a glimpse of his wrist during his morning shave – hand steady, razor sharp – he has to pull away slowly with the shock of realizing that they’ve gone pale. Weak, anaemic blue. It shouldn’t be a surprise, for he hasn’t felt a connection in years – not since that night, the stabbing – and Sherlock is, well. He’s surviving – thriving – and hostile in a nearly perfunctory way, a habit long-learned and not easily tossed aside. 

The tremor that floats through him thrills, and he tamps it down, sternly. In his business, caring is not an advantage; fondness – love – only leads to weakness. 

++

“Detective Inspector.” Lestrade cocks his chin, looking over his shoulder; he’s stopped being surprised when Mycroft drops by at the end of a case – after Sherlock, if possible – and begun instead to take his visits with a sort of resigned amusement. His lip twitches up, just a bit, and he finishes his conversation with the young DC in front of him before turning.

“Greg,” he says, and Mycroft blinks. “Lestrade if you have to, but don’t call me Detective Inspector.”

“Greg, then,” Mycroft says, slowly, and is disarmed by Greg’s unfettered grin.

“I’m knackered,” Greg says, “and one of you posh protein bars won’t do it.” He steps in front of Mycroft. “Let’s get a coffee.” Mycroft blinks, and stirs himself to follow once Greg’s unexpectedly five strides away. It takes him a moment to remember: the park, the awful sandwich. He does have a bar in his pocket, meals being difficult to schedule in his line of work, and he doesn’t offer it.

They get paper cups of stomach-tarring liquid from the Spar at the corner; Greg pays, insistent, and Mycroft sips at his politely. They stand outside the shop, across the street from the taped-off scene, and discuss the case. Greg leans against the wall; Mycroft doesn’t. He has little reason to be there – the case was relatively simple, in Sherlock’s terms, and Sherlock is doing fine. Well, actually. And yet: he sips at his coffee and glances at Greg, noticing the stubble along his jaw, silvered, and the way the corners of his eyes crease when he squints. He needs glasses.

“It’s been a long day for you,” Mycroft states, once Greg is finished outlining the case. Greg screws up his eyes, peering at nothing in particular, and rubs at his watch. No – Mycroft realizes with a strange, unsettling spark – at his wrist. “Doesn’t your wife mind?” he asks, knowing his impertinence, and Greg presses his lips together and says, “You Holmeses miss nothing.”

“I didn’t –” Mycroft begins to lie, then stops when Greg looks at him, askance. “That was indelicate. I apologise.” 

Greg sighs and drinks the last of his coffee. “No,” he says, “it’s fine. It – well. This is my third reset,” he murmurs, and looks at Mycroft, who keeps his expression firmly sympathetic. His stomach thrills, though, twists and roils in an unsettling, excited fashion. 

“That must be difficult,” he says, and Greg laughs, a short, hard bark. 

“Yeah. Bloody –” He purses his lips, swipes his palm across his mouth. “You married, then?” he asks abruptly, and his gaze drops, brief though frank, to Mycroft’s wrist. His curiosity sends a flush up the back of Mycroft’s neck.

“No,” he says, quite shortly, and Greg raises an eyebrow. “Thank you for the coffee,” Mycroft says, a touch too quickly to be casual, and steps away from the wall. He keeps the paper cup clutched in his hand until he’s seated in the back of his car, where he notices, blankly, and sets it carefully into the cupholder.

++

Kidnapping is a harsh word; a conversation, merely, with perhaps a tactful display of power to begin. This doctor fellow, though, seems to care little about the circumstances of his abduction. He’s caught Sherlock’s eye, but Mycroft doubts it will be for long, ready to disregard him as yet another of Sherlock’s experiments until – until Dr Watson clenches his fist and tucks his arm closer to his body and Mycroft has to keep his eyes from widening. 

Oh.

If this man, this quietly belligerent, achingly angry, hostilely amused soldier – doctor – _soldier_ in front of Mycroft has zeroed for Sherlock, he could be just what Sherlock needs. Or, more likely, they’ll be insufferable together and now there’ll be two of them. Mycroft lets him go but stays in the storehouse after, pondering. 

++

Dr Watson – John – is there, again, at the crime scene, and the brotherly conversation is brief, but long enough for Mycroft’s eyes to linger, long and pointedly, at Sherlock’s wrist; for Sherlock to pink about his ears and snap something hateful about Mummy; for Mycroft to bite back his retort, for Sherlock doesn’t know, Sherlock has never known, and now he needn’t. 

Mycroft watches them go, distractedly, and it’s only when Anthea says, “Sir?” like she’s uncertain – Anthea is rarely uncertain – that he realizes he’s been scratching at his wrist with the handle of his umbrella. He flexes his wrist, hands dropping to his sides, and doesn’t look until he arrives home, though he knows.

_01:02:10:16:24:37_

++

Wristtime, on its own, can only impart finite data; to know what the numbers mean, one must examine the wide, sprawling minutiae of human behaviour. 

Sherlock and John both have held decades in their wrists, and it’s a strange, but tenable, sort of loyalty they’ve forged. Greg, a serial reset, is the stuff of daytime telly fodder, and yet he approaches each new deadline with a resigned sort of hope. He’s never said, but Mycroft suspects he’d been scrambled, for a while, after his most recent reset; for a few weeks his fingers are ever on his wrist, rubbing at the itch. He still touches it, absently, from time to time; unlike Mycroft, who puts the numbers out of his mind, or Sherlock, who wilfully deletes them, Greg is the sort of man intimately attuned to each ticking second. Mycroft’s not quite worked out if it’s hope or apprehension that drives him.

++

Greg’s knee brushes his under the table, and Mycroft keeps his leg very still, feeling the warmth press into his inner calf, until Greg shifts his foot, crossing his ankles, and Mycroft very deliberately moves his leg away. Across the table, Greg’s hands are broad – steady – around his mug and Mycroft sips his espresso to mask his nerves. 

Recently back from vacation, Greg is bronzed, tanned across his forehead and the sweeps of his cheeks, pink on the tip of his nose where he’s burnt, and his hair seems the more silver for it. 

It’s just coffee; two acquaintances chatting over a well-brewed cup and a – perhaps slightly intimate – table. Greg had assented without knowing why; he did that now, accepted Mycroft’s word, and the power tastes sweet and warm in Mycroft’s mouth. The truth is, it’s just coffee. Companionship, perhaps, if Mycroft were stretching.

Greg crooks one elbow over the back of his chair, comfortable and easy, and his outstretched ankle just touches Mycroft’s, and his eyes are blue and mirthful. Mycroft says – something – and Greg laughs, broad and full and comfortable, like his hands on the china mug, and Mycroft’s smile isn’t quite as tight. Greg gestures, then lays one palm flat on the table for emphasis, drawing Mycroft’s eye.

The line on his ring finger has faded, quite well, and Mycroft realizes, quite suddenly, that Greg hasn’t once touched his wrist, unconsciously, the whole time they’ve been there. He’s close, nearing zero, Mycroft deduces, and ignores the swooping drop of his gut. Greg says something about the football, and Mycroft murmurs an assent and wonders how long is inscribed this time, when Greg’s finger will sport a new ring. 

Sherlock and John are on a field trip – like Boy Scouts, though not nearly so industrious – making nuisances of themselves, and Mycroft had planned to send Anthea along, in a day or two, to make nice and smooth any ruffled Army feathers, but a new idea strikes him, quite cruelly, and he interrupts Greg to say, “Have you ever been to Dartmouth?”

They shake hands when Greg stands to leave, subdued, and touch nowhere else. Mycroft stands until the door closes behind Greg, then sits and orders another espresso. Blood flows quite swiftly through his veins – human and frail – and as he takes a sip it pulses, distinctly, and it’s not the caffeine. He settles the demitasse in its saucer and rotates his wrist, not needing to look.

_Damn._

++

They don’t get any information of use out of Moriarty – despite their tactics – but Mycroft had expected little else. That’s not quite the point of the exercise, in any case. Moriarty, fed and fed; not quite on honeydew and milk of paradise, but that which will keep him hungry and desperate and aching for more – for Sherlock. 

It’s rather like a wildlife rehabilitation, Mycroft thinks; releasing the caged animal back into the wild. The sun is hot – too hot – on the back of his neck, and he has to keep himself, with some wilful force, from tapping the tip of his umbrella with impatience. 

Though the thought is amusing: Moriarty, self-styled most dangerous man in London, waddling off to swim in the lake, or scurrying away to seek out nuts, or flocking to passing tourists to beg a bite of bread, the man is not being released into the park like a furred or feathered creature. He’s not even in the city – they had to make an effort, after all. 

However, Moriarty’s web is all-too-human, and the laconic St James’s Park is a known contact point, and with no physical descriptions Mycroft trusts only his own eyes to seek out those for whom today’s events have some import. 

_Legwork_ , he thinks, mopping the back of his neck with a handkerchief. 

He hears his name called just as he’s indicating an order to a few of his men, milling around the park, to move in on a suspect, and ignoring it does no good. Greg jogs up to him, touching his shoulder, and Mycroft blinks slowly before turning to the side. His grin, wide, and his temples shiny with sweat, Greg looks hopeful and hesitant and, yes, quite attractive; Mycroft feels the heavy pull of his too-hot blood, stirred from sluggishness and yearning, and has to step back. 

Greg cannot be involved in the current operation, he tells himself. For the good of the mission and the safety of – well, of relative civilians; the platitudes scroll through his mind, rote, and he will not let them be overridden by the wash of pleasure – of fondness – at seeing Greg, there, incongruous to the task but suited to the space. They’re mere steps away from the bench of their first meeting, after all, and pinkness splashes Greg’s cheeks and his teeth are white and even at the edge of his lips, and Mycroft must force him away.

He looks at his watch with feigned impatience; it has double meaning, the watch being what it is, but Greg – frank and uncompromised and deeply loyal – accepts it at its unfraught surface, ducks his head, and makes his goodbyes. Mycroft doesn’t watch him leave, his attention needed elsewhere, but can feel each step between them in the gentle and resigned beating of his heart.

++

“It might kill John,” Mycroft says, and wonders if John feels that familiar pulse whenever Sherlock is on one of his schemes. He’s usually there with him, so – perhaps not. 

“Moriarty will anyway,” Sherlock says, with feigned indifference, but Mycroft sees the flicker of his eyelids, rapid and nervous. 

“This isn’t the type of lie you can take back,” Mycroft warns, and thinks _sometimes you shouldn’t tell all of the truth_. “It’s a crueller, more insidious sort.”

“Yes, well. I learnt from the best, didn’t I?” Mycroft does not allow himself to breath, not for a long moment, but still Sherlock bites down on his lip and turns away, triumphant.

“Lestrade will – he’ll hate it. He’ll feel guilty.” There’s cruel pleasure in Sherlock’s voice; this isn’t about convincing Mycroft.

Mycroft shrugs, forcing the gesture and knowing that Sherlock sees. “He’s a good man,” he says, but cannot say it with the indifference he would wish.

Sherlock huffs. “You’re a fool,” he says, and Mycroft merely looks at him. Nostrils flaring, Sherlock tosses his head back, and drinks the port Mycroft had poured at his arrival in one long draught, his neck pale when he swallows. His chin is rather weak – they share that, along with a rather striking rigidity of the nose – and his eyes, in the low light, are glassy. 

“You’ll help me,” Sherlock states, and Mycroft doesn’t need to answer. His zeros are no longer for Sherlock, but they’re still brothers, and Mycroft’s blood pounds through their veins, shared. 

Two days later, Sherlock is dead, and then on a plane to Switzerland, and Mycroft ties his tie and tucks in his pocket square with neat-fingered precision and buckles his watch down, tight, on his wrist.

++

With each text, each message, Mycroft sees only Greg’s face at the funeral, too grey again, and his desperate, clutching hand, and feels once more the hard clench of heat in his gut. He should delete them – he would, but – but he doesn’t; they remain pixels on a screen of a rarely-used phone. Greg might be the only one with the number, still; the only one who uses it, at any rate. Mycroft trades up – and up and up – often, and changes the number with it, so that only those who really need to can get in touch with him, the rest routed through his assistant. 

It would be easier, perhaps, if Greg were angry. If his missives were screeds against the world – against Mycroft – against his own pain and loss, but instead they’re, well. Mycroft begins to understand what it means to be a serial reset, in Greg’s case, what it means to give of yourself over, and over, and over, until someone new needs you. 

Even – even speaking to him is impossible. His zeros may no longer be for Sherlock, but Mycroft can still imagine – distantly, and no doubt only fractionally – the agony of his brother’s death. To have to pretend, for even the slightest moment, the enduring pain of his own blood, spilled and gone, to Greg’s kind and sympathetic face is – untenable. Instead, he straps on public school stoicism and goes about his days with people too intimidated by him to know any better. 

John, he visits once, only, after their conflagration at the club in those early days: on the anniversary of Sherlock’s fictive fall. Even before John bloodies his nose, Mycroft’s berating himself for not anticipating the circumstances; for of course Greg would be there, they are friends, and of course he would follow Mycroft down the stairs and touch his nose and dab his fingertips red with Mycroft’s pulsing, aching blood, and of course – of course – he would be zeroed. Blatant, vicious zeros in a neat, tiny line, their brilliance obscuring the faint marks of a reset. Mycroft’s pulse is violent, pounding in his nose, his jaw, behind his eyes and at the tips of his ears, wrapping tight around the nodes of his throat and pooling, heavy, in the dip of his clavicle, and his feet are awkward, clumsy, as he stumbles his way out into the thin, damp air of Baker Street.

++

He has no reason to believe – nor expect – Greg to hold any affection for him. As far as Greg is concerned, after all, their only connection is dead.

It’s better this way, of course. Sentiment.

++

And yet – isn’t that the way of human nature, frail and prone to _and yet_ s – Mycroft maintains his surveillance on Greg, nothing too invasive, and reminds himself that one of the gunmen had been fated for him.

(Not for Mycroft, of course. Blood of his blood, but not – 

He pushes the thought away.)

There’s no one new in Greg’s life: his flat still a bachelor abode, his days still filled with work, his nights spent alone or occasionally with John. His finger still bare, and his hand, lifting the towel off Mycroft’s pulpy nose, gentle, and one text only, after, to the mostly-silent phone that Mycroft keeps tucked in a drawer in his dresser. Next to his handkerchiefs. 

_He won’t say it, but John’s sorry. I am too. Can we talk? Please._

They can’t talk – Mycroft can’t talk – with so much to give away and a strange desire to do so, an impulse, barely checked, to tell Greg how very much he wishes it were in his power to pull the greyness from his cheeks. Most things are in his power, but not this, not now.

++

Mycroft would have Sherlock’s return orchestrated, conducted; Sherlock, of course, manages it by tackling an escaping sniper to the ground in the middle of Baker Street; by the misfortune of doing so in front of a reporter who recognizes him and getting himself on the news; and by getting into a shouting match with a John too irate to be relieved. 

Mycroft stands sentry when Greg arrives, gaping and incredulous, and he’d nearly forgotten the malleability of Greg’s face, which plays his every emotion in its small wrinkles, its creases and pores and furrows. 

He is owed an explanation; Mycroft feels the obligation deep in his veins, and he flexes his fist to keep from guiding Greg by his elbow to shelter under the awning. “I have something to tell you,” he says, meaning to lay out the plot from the beginning – what can be revealed at this juncture, at least – and Greg interrupts, saying with some amusement, “You knew the whole time.”

“I – yes,” Mycroft says, and then, “You couldn’t be informed,” which is harsh, and not quite truthful and enough to make Greg exhale, slowly, and bow his head.

“You would be a distraction,” Mycroft says, as though he hadn’t been, as though there hadn’t been a corner of his mind unsettled, constantly, by Greg’s continued existence in the world apart from Mycroft, as though the beats of his heart hadn’t woken him too many nights, aching and uncertain and desperate for proof of Greg’s safety. Chin tipping up, Greg meets his eyes – steady, sure, an unexpected forgiveness written in the creases at the corners – and Mycroft’s blood sings with the need to confess. Is that what it means, to be Greg, to love so often and so easily, to forgive so much? 

“I find,” he begins, and the words come jumbled and achingly truthful and desperately unfamiliar, at once a risk and a need, and they fall and fall until stopped, with a sharp juddering halt, by Greg’s hand encircling his wrist. His fingers nudge Mycroft’s watchband up, just a bit, until the pads of his fingers just touch the pulsing insistence of Mycroft’s veins, and he tugs, just enough, that they step together.


End file.
